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akx

> Typically, other archives like .tar.bz2 can be smaller. But those aren’t backwards-compatible!

Is there any point for (new) .bz2 archives in the era of Zstd?

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Tooling ?

It takes years for bzip2 be in every Linux Distro, and we _still_ doing gzip.

LZMA / xz tool are start to get more support, but they are nowhere near universal.

No idea when how long zstd will need.

xz is pretty universal across POSIX and clones though. It comes with any modern Linux distro, Busybox even has an .xz decompressor, so `tar xvJF file.tar.xz` does the right thing in *NIX land, which I presume includes MacOS with Brew.

For Windows systems, 7-zip (.7z, similar compression to .xz) is a free download for Windows 10, and Windows 11 can open up a .7z file with a simple double click.

.zip and .gz no longer need to be used here in 2026.

.zip is used as a seekable container with some compression. There is no replacement comparable in simplicity. 7z is overcomplicated, compressed tar is not seekable.

.gz/deflate is used when something very cheap and very fast is needed. xz/lzma is quite often too slow or requires too much memory even on decompression.

so no, .zip and .gz are very much needed in 2026.

Compared to xz and even parallel xz, gzip and parallel gzip are just better if speed is more important. The compression is not superior but already good if you consider just the uncompressed data. For long term storage, it makes sense, to invest the extra time for better compression but if it's about transfer time, you might end up with a overall longer processing time instead of just a longer transfer time because of a worse compression ratio. It's like with image formats: Pick the right one for your use case.

If you add zstd to the comparison matrix, it wins on both speed and compression ratio. Its adoption is quickly catching up to xz as a result, and I expect it to approach gzip in availability in a few years.

gzip is very fast, universally supported, and good enough. It will be around for ever.

you need python 3.14 for zstd.

Zstd is implemented in C?

GitHub won't let you upload a 7z file as an attachment for the issue tracker. Thus forcing me to use an inferior and obsolete compression format.

To be fair, gnu tar 1.31, 2019-01-02, added `--zstd` (and other automatic .zst support). So that support has been there for a good 7 years and 4 months at the time of writing.

Debian? Did they discover it yet?

I think it's been in since debian 11... at least 12, it's been in my default ansible playbooks for a while.

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